I'm 50 this year. I've moved back to Ireland on four seperate occasions and it was always a complete fiasco. Moving from places where the basic services were in place. Functioning public transport and a general sense that what I put in comes back in the contract between me and the state. It's so refreshing to read and listen to someone that articulates the diasporas frustrations so well. Thank you. On a sombre note. If they've never lived anywhere else they'll never know anything.else. Keep it up. Love it.
Thank you, Sinéad, for writing this. It’s almost like finding a voice. I say this as a thirty-year-old who has spent a third of his life in Dublin.
I have always wondered where the government revenue is being spent, but as an immigrant keen to avoid social media retribution, I never dared ask.
This piece is so thoroughly informative though in the manner in which it addresses the question. Parts of your piece reminded me of Mariana Mazuccato’s book “The Entrepreneurial State”. Clearly, state capacity is worth investing in.
Here’s hoping for a more efficient utilisation of our tax money (through optimum allocation in the first instance) and to better quality-of-life outcomes.
The electricity system in the Republic of Ireland is a good example of "The Entrepreneurial State" Contrary to the political and economic culture of the time, in 1925 the recently created Irish Free State Government and Dáil passed the Shannon Electricity Act. This committed the government to spending about 20% of the state's budget on creating the first national electricity system in the world based on hydropower from the Ardnacrusha Station, which also had to be built!. (see my reply to Majella Fox for a link to a short account of that development) Two years later, the government set up the ESB as a state-owned monopoly generator/distributor/seller of electricity. That monopoly ended in 1999. With the EU-driven liberalisation of the electricity market, E/Airtricity (an Irish set-up/owned/financed start-up) led in developing wind energy, without state subsidy or guaranteed prices while competing with the state-owned ESB for customers. Prior to that Government (and ESB) adopted a do-minimum approach to wind energy ie. both had lost entrepreneurial drive. to harness natural resources which inspired the Shannon Scheme. Airtricity (with GE) built the Arklow Banks wind farm, the only offshore facility built here. Later Airtricity built (with Fluor) the Greater Gabbard windfarm off the UK east coast. ESB - still state-owned - has yet to build an offshore wind farm in Ireland. Yes, state capacity is worth investing in. But how do we ensure that such insiders and incumbents do not become complacent, with more effort being spent on preserving a status quo than on promoting/adapting to new challenges as the Danes did when creating the modern wind turbine industry in response the 1970s oil supply crises?
I trust you do not mind my drawing attention to a most egregious example of the politics of grand gestures replacing quiet competence over decades - with specific reference to enhancing public transport in the Dublin area. In 1998, the Government decided on a light rail system for Dublin - now LUAS. The original proposal was for one system. Dublin Chamber of Commerce, CIE and the then Director of Traffic for Dublin Corporation lobbied against this on-street network. This led to building two non-interconnected lines. Nearly 30 years later, these lines are still not-interconnected for passenger services. That 1998 decision also included extending the Green Line to Broadstone - via a short tunnel and on to the Airport, using the then unbuilt railway cutting to the Royal Canal. Detailed studies were done, which I still have. One result was the distance between the two rail beds was increased on the Green Line to allow for higher speeds using LUAS trams built for underground running. This 1998 decision was not acted on in the 2000s when the Green LUAS was extended -on-street - to Broadstone. Now the latest wheeze is a ~€16bn. boondoggle Metrolink. This will not be interoperable with either the ~25 year old LUAS or the commuter services on the older heavy rail eg. DART. If built, it will not add experience or build up skills or create supply chains needed for other LUAS type-projects in Cork, Galway or even Dublin. It is an example of "strategic misrepresentation" reinforced by a planning system that has been reduced little more than a limited form of building control, anchored in a view of government as the bureaucratic mediation of interest groups. In October 2015, at the annual meeting of the Dublin Economic Workshop I proposed a North Dublin LUAS Loop and have continued to do so eg. most recently a year ago https://cassandravoices.com/science-environment/does-dublin-require-3-railway-systems/ FYI, I was among a group of residents' associations which proposed and actively campaigned for the Dublin Port Tunnel, even though it went under some of our members' homes. We supported it as one of a set of mutually reinforcing measures that would improve traffic management and enhance our areas.
Don't forget that in the late 1970s, the entire Temple Bar area belonged to the State (via CIE, the national train and bus company). The idea was supposedly to create a bus station (and potentially, a subway hub). Ultimately, the whole thing was scotched under Haughey and Temple Bar was "developed".
Outstanding contribution from a unique mind but unhappily the problem is deeper and bigger. It depths go into culture, media and the political system to which it connects, and bigger because the Dail is merely the summer help, power has been exported upwards to the EU and beyond to the apex predator class. We no longer have a parliament just an intermediary processing someone else’s strategy. You don’t have to look too far, there’s 17 of them.
Sinead nails it by standing her ground on diagnosis and delivering an essay worthy of Economics in One Lesson or The Road to Serfdom. But economics on its own won’t solve the deeper and bigger problems.
Dead right on those “solution” mongers. Don’t let them deflect you from the problem analysis, Sinéad. Keep going. Staying with the problem is absolutely key. As per Socrates to Meno, “..To search for the solution of a problem is an absurdity. For either you know what you are looking for, and then there is no problem, or you do not know what you are looking for, and then you are not looking for anything and cannot expect to find anything..”. - Keep talking about the problems, describing them, and the proper solutions become unavoidable.
Indeed that brings to mind the matter of institutional reform that Sinéad has as her object (I infer). The institutions of this country are roughly a hundred years old. These institutions are not supposed to represent the arbitrary will of the present. Rather they are the outward manifestation of the country’s character, of the collective character of all of our people living here since independence. For better or worse they are an expression of the country’s needs, the will of our nation, as has made itself felt in our democracy over these hundred or so years. Point being that radical measures, great reforms, and far reaching transformations of our institutions may be putting the cart before the horse. In my opinion we might need to start with the horse.
Agree with you in so far as I believe that institutions are a set of values with an organisation to serve those values. Thus values precede the organisation and organisations can last far longer that the values that gave rise to them. One example is the Catholic Church in RofIreland. For decades, it provided, inter alia, primary and much secondary education in the form of a privately owned, very heavily state subsidised (teachers’ pay/conditions) and state regulated (eg. curricula, exams). Even with that, a 1972 referendum removed the Constitutional recognition of the special place of the Catholic Church, along with specific mention of other religious groups (including Jewish Congregations) from our 1937 constitution. IMO, the institutions to which we delegate our power (in elections) need to be radically re-organised. Our values now are basically a high material standard of living based on trading goods and services. At one stage, we emigrated to get that ie. 1950s, 1980s and before. As Sinéad has pointed out, we have not given ourselves the kinds of organisations that can enhance life here for all those who want to live and work here. Now, we are a country where the population has increased by two-thirds in 60 years, the workforce has doubled in 40 years and immigration exceeds emigration. Some of our institutions have changed, but have enough? And if these are to change, what is the set of values on which new/changed institutions are to be based? At one level, we seem to recognise this, as only one outgoing government has been re-elected since 1969 ie. the Bertie Ahern led FF-PD governments elected in 1997 and 2002. There has been some churn in political parties during that time. But is that a good enough way to reset ourselves in a very different world from that in which our way of governing ourselves was institutionalised in our 1937 constitution? A Swiss politician once told me that because the Swiss have 4 referendum days every year, they have plenty of opportunities to discuss/decide what it means to be Swiss without waiting for general elections every four years. They can develop, explore and decide on options about everything in society. Many of these options do not come from those elected to local/cantonal/federal assemblies and the wider public service. That calls for different type of statecraft, IMO.
Great article. My own theory is that all of the problems Ireland are seeing are all across Europe. Rents have soared in Spain for example, with regular talk of gerontocracy. Further, it seems that infrastructure could be built across Europe until 2008, when capitalism - built on the ludicrous idea of exponential growth on a finite planet, forever - reached its breaking point. The difference is, the rest of Europe had already built its infrastructure and institutions by then. After 2008, the finance system disconnected from physical reality and money was printed and printed, but the stuff infrastructure is made from - steel from coal, copper, concrete from coal - couldn't be. And so every project looks fine on paper but in reality, with resource limitations in every direction (including water, sand and soon the master-resource oil), it couldn't be built at anything close to budget. One thing someone can try is Google any city in Europe and "housing crisis" and see what turns up. And this when birth rates are at an all time low. There's something a lot more sinister than ineptitude going on.
the same problems are at play in every Western country but for mismanagement, the Irish Governments of the last half century (in several periods of economic booms) are in a class of their own, and deliver outcomes unacceptable outside of third world nations
I only just found you last night on a podcast Sinead and I'm so happy! I was listening to the Irish Times podcast with Hugh Linehan. I have to admit I listened and felt both incredibly disturbed and incredibly excited. Finally someone who is actually being allowed to speak and who actually knows what she is talking about. Honestly, this is such a breath of fresh air.
Very insightful Sinead, I agree with most of what is said , however, we do have a successful export agency and some very successful food brands etc. However these are the exception for sure, the lack of capability at public level to deliver out services other than redistribute and collect money from the citizens of the country is a real issue for sure, we need a much more capable civil service who can deliver out infrastructure and planning at speed .
We suffer the same mediocrity as the rest of the world when it comes to politicians . Who would want to be a politician ?
As you have said this goes back to the foundations of the state and our party politics has perhaps stopped the civil service from moving forward and organising itself to be more aligned to the needs of the citizens it serves. It needs to be modernised and reshaped to the world we live in today , there are glimpses of ability in certain areas but very few and far between. I haven't heard one politician in government talk about the modernisation of the Civil Service and its service delivery.
There are very few senior civil servants household names ( Robert Watt maybe an exception) why is this so? I agree with you that we need to up our game at this level and encourage a culture of "Cathedral Thinking" rather than what can we get away with until the next Minister is appointed. How should we go about this?
Thanks you for articulating so succinctly what I have been feeling in my gut over the 25 years since I have left Ireland. I love the country, but feel so frustrated at the gap between where Ireland is and where it could be given our wealth and our amazing people. Don't stop now Sinéad, you are speaking for so many of us, and your voice is a ringing bell that needs to be heard by Irish across the world.
Your article really struck me because I can recognise parts of what you are describing in ordinary life: people working, paying taxes, trying to contribute, and still feeling trapped by housing costs, public-service gaps, and constant financial pressure.
I also noticed your line about “pissing off the right people” being a sign that you are getting close to something important. I understand the need to provoke debate, but I’m wondering who you believe the “right people” are. Shouldn’t the pressure be directed mainly upwards, towards government, departments, policy-makers, and the systems that allow public money to flow outward without building lasting public capacity?
For people living inside this system now, what is the practical solution? What can ordinary working people actually do, individually or collectively, when the diagnosis is clear, but the pressures are immediate?
I may be wrong on the details, but my understanding is that Finland did not simply rely on market solutions. It used stronger public policy, including Housing First and citizen-led democratic mechanisms, to treat housing as a social necessity rather than just a private commodity.
So my question is: why can’t Ireland have the same level of public ambition? Why are ordinary workers left paying the price for a housing system that does not allow people to live affordably, move for work, or build a stable life?
Your writing is very sharp, and I can see that you have thought deeply about housing, public spending, and how ordinary people are being “super squeezed” with such realities!
At various stages, people in Ireland had levels of public ambition. Where else did Aer Lingus come from? Later, Tony Ryan emerged from Aer Lingus to set up
first GPA, which "failed" but it did lead to Ireland becoming a world-wide centre for aircraft leasing and then, Ryanair. Later An Bord Báinne (now Ornua) gave rise to Kerrygold. Earlier, the Irish Free State set up the first national electricity system in the world, when it decided to build the Shannon Scheme in 1925 and set up the ESB two years later. I found some evidence that the approach then adopted to electrification inspired FDRoosevelt to set up TVA and later BPA. see my short article on this development https://www.academia.edu/128581192/Power_to_the_People_Arthur_Griffith_and_the_Shannon_Scheme For the sake of completeness, the hydro station at Ardnacrusha was overbuilt. Only four of the 6 turbines provided for were ever installed, as those involved overestimated the water flow.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a crisis as “a time of great danger, difficulty, or uncertainty when problems must be solved or important decisions must be made” - a crucial turning point in a sequence of events. By that definition, what Ireland is experiencing fails the test entirely.
A crisis implies a break from normality. A threshold crossed. A moment demanding action before it’s too late. What Ireland has instead is something far more damning: a permanent condition masquerading as an emergency.
I moved to Ireland in 1993. Housing was a problem then. It was a problem in the years that followed. Three decades of unbroken, consistent, structural failure. That is not a crisis. That is policy.
Calling it a crisis does something insidious - it implies the situation is exceptional, temporary, and ultimately resolvable once the emergency passes. It lets decision-makers off the hook by framing chronic neglect as bad luck. It gives political cover to those who have repeatedly chosen not to act.
Ireland doesn’t have a housing crisis. It’s worse than that. It has a chronic housing condition — one that has been tolerated and accepted by successive governments for at least thirty years. Sinead’s excellent piece illustrates how this came to be. Let’s see if something comes of it. 🤞🏻
You don’t really seem offer many actual solutions here, just more state intervention and spending? You seem to be in fact contradicting this idea for most of your article, instead blaming most failures on government intervention in the market such as HAP no? State intervention being ineffective does not mean the state is ‘absent’, it means the state is, as is widely known, is generally ineffective at providing good outcomes when intervening in markets. The failure of intervention is not in fact evidence of the need for more intervention
You also state that a model of over intervention necessitating deregulation applies perhaps to the US, but not to Ireland. I again, don’t understand what you mean. Texas for example has a rapidly growing housing stock and falling rental prices due to the fact they are incredibly lacking in state intervention, significantly more so than Ireland. Is your claim really that the state in Texas is bigger and more far reaching in the market than in Ireland and that this justified deregulation? That just seems absurd, I’d really like if you could clarify why deregulation as a solution applies to the US, but not Ireland specifically.
You take issue with the concept of modular housing for reasons I quite frankly don’t understand. Lowering the ‘baseline’??? Pricing it into the ‘market’ ??? Again could you clarify what exactly you mean here. Can you actually explain the mechanisms and why the alternative world where there is a ban on renters choosing to live in modular housing is better for the welfare of renters than the alternative. Modular housing does offer a legitimate partial solution to a housing shortage, opposing it because it’s beneath your standards only harms renters.
I can't see how all you've taken from the article is that the author is proposing more intervention and more spending. Even if you want to give the author no credit at all, you could at least recognise that she's proposing better usage of the vast amounts of public money being spent and more sensible interventions grounded in long-term policies to address challenges at source.
You might not think this a novel take, but given that we haven't had anything close to that in 20+ plus years, it should be said again and again in as many forums as can be.
What you have missed entirely, willfully or not I don't know, is the framing of the problem and an articulation of how the various mechanisms and bandages that have been rolled out ad hoc have failed and will continue to fail.
And lastly, she does propose a solution, in so much as one can in an article. That the state builds more. That the state owns what it currently rents and borrows. So that we, the taxpayers, get value for the money we contribute. Again, not novel, but practicially revolutionary in the context of what we currently get.
Who cares if "deregulate, enable market supply, build modular units in gardens" would result in more housing supply, benefitting renters / first time home buyers? They're private sector, and that gives Sinead the ick!
Seriously though, there's no distinction between government as (an over) regulator (bad) and a builder of social housing (good)
Or between the private sector as renter landlords (bad) or developers (good)
Public vs private is a terrible way to gauge whether policies are good or not
It's not about MORE government intervention, it's about long term EFFECTIVE government for all members of our society. The current govt has little interest in Irish society, makes me think we desperately need to replace Me Fein with Sinn Fein
I don't believe Sinead was arguing that modular housing wasn't a convenient solution to Ireland's housing crisis. She was arguing that convenient solutions like these are symptomatic of a broader malaise and lowering of standards in public life. I suppose a similar stereotype in the U.S. is that of Millennials and Zoomers living in "their parent's basement". Sure, the phenomenon is an effective solution to the housing crisis - freely utilising excess capacity in the housing market to increase personal savings, rather than renting or paying off an expensive mortgage thereby increasing demand-side pressure on the housing market. But as the stereotype indicates, the social and societal dimensions are also important - it indicates a generation that is not thriving, and a solution that offers less than what has been offered to previous generations. Socially, a larger share of these generations grow up with less esteem and status; societally, the implicit social contract that each generation will have better opportunities available than the previous is forgotten. Thus economically rational solutions to societal problems can gradually cause greater problems in the long-term.
Oh so that's why my private health care premium.went up 40% in three years. The state is driving private hospital cost inflation through outsourcing to private hospitals. Tier 3 cascade it seems. .great so they are going to collapse the private health system also with unaffordable premiums
How about we offer solutions. All heads of the civil service. Many serviing since the 80's and 90's need to be put in front of committees and held to account. Then we can start to build a new fairer society.
re. Heads of Civil Service. Secretaries-General are now the civil service heads of government departments. They are also Accounting Officers for moneys voted on. Among their statutory duties are giving evidence to the Dáil Public Accounts Committee (PAC). By convention, this Committee is normally chaired by an Opposition TD. Note that since the mid 1980s, the normal term of office for a Secretary General of a Government Department is 7 years. This may be extended. I gather that such extensions are normally for not more than three years and for one term only. After this term, Governments may decide to appoint an outgoing Secretary General to another Department eg. Robert Watt went to the Dept.of Health, after 10 years (as far as I recall) in the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform.
Fantastic stuff, Sinéad. Is the concept of the failure premiums an original thought / lens - if not are there other examples/writers. Brilliant throughout.
This could be our TJ Whitaker moment of the 21st Century, curious that it has come from outside the Public Service. Ground breaking. Keep up the great work.
I'm 50 this year. I've moved back to Ireland on four seperate occasions and it was always a complete fiasco. Moving from places where the basic services were in place. Functioning public transport and a general sense that what I put in comes back in the contract between me and the state. It's so refreshing to read and listen to someone that articulates the diasporas frustrations so well. Thank you. On a sombre note. If they've never lived anywhere else they'll never know anything.else. Keep it up. Love it.
Thank you, Sinéad, for writing this. It’s almost like finding a voice. I say this as a thirty-year-old who has spent a third of his life in Dublin.
I have always wondered where the government revenue is being spent, but as an immigrant keen to avoid social media retribution, I never dared ask.
This piece is so thoroughly informative though in the manner in which it addresses the question. Parts of your piece reminded me of Mariana Mazuccato’s book “The Entrepreneurial State”. Clearly, state capacity is worth investing in.
Here’s hoping for a more efficient utilisation of our tax money (through optimum allocation in the first instance) and to better quality-of-life outcomes.
Thanks again
The electricity system in the Republic of Ireland is a good example of "The Entrepreneurial State" Contrary to the political and economic culture of the time, in 1925 the recently created Irish Free State Government and Dáil passed the Shannon Electricity Act. This committed the government to spending about 20% of the state's budget on creating the first national electricity system in the world based on hydropower from the Ardnacrusha Station, which also had to be built!. (see my reply to Majella Fox for a link to a short account of that development) Two years later, the government set up the ESB as a state-owned monopoly generator/distributor/seller of electricity. That monopoly ended in 1999. With the EU-driven liberalisation of the electricity market, E/Airtricity (an Irish set-up/owned/financed start-up) led in developing wind energy, without state subsidy or guaranteed prices while competing with the state-owned ESB for customers. Prior to that Government (and ESB) adopted a do-minimum approach to wind energy ie. both had lost entrepreneurial drive. to harness natural resources which inspired the Shannon Scheme. Airtricity (with GE) built the Arklow Banks wind farm, the only offshore facility built here. Later Airtricity built (with Fluor) the Greater Gabbard windfarm off the UK east coast. ESB - still state-owned - has yet to build an offshore wind farm in Ireland. Yes, state capacity is worth investing in. But how do we ensure that such insiders and incumbents do not become complacent, with more effort being spent on preserving a status quo than on promoting/adapting to new challenges as the Danes did when creating the modern wind turbine industry in response the 1970s oil supply crises?
I trust you do not mind my drawing attention to a most egregious example of the politics of grand gestures replacing quiet competence over decades - with specific reference to enhancing public transport in the Dublin area. In 1998, the Government decided on a light rail system for Dublin - now LUAS. The original proposal was for one system. Dublin Chamber of Commerce, CIE and the then Director of Traffic for Dublin Corporation lobbied against this on-street network. This led to building two non-interconnected lines. Nearly 30 years later, these lines are still not-interconnected for passenger services. That 1998 decision also included extending the Green Line to Broadstone - via a short tunnel and on to the Airport, using the then unbuilt railway cutting to the Royal Canal. Detailed studies were done, which I still have. One result was the distance between the two rail beds was increased on the Green Line to allow for higher speeds using LUAS trams built for underground running. This 1998 decision was not acted on in the 2000s when the Green LUAS was extended -on-street - to Broadstone. Now the latest wheeze is a ~€16bn. boondoggle Metrolink. This will not be interoperable with either the ~25 year old LUAS or the commuter services on the older heavy rail eg. DART. If built, it will not add experience or build up skills or create supply chains needed for other LUAS type-projects in Cork, Galway or even Dublin. It is an example of "strategic misrepresentation" reinforced by a planning system that has been reduced little more than a limited form of building control, anchored in a view of government as the bureaucratic mediation of interest groups. In October 2015, at the annual meeting of the Dublin Economic Workshop I proposed a North Dublin LUAS Loop and have continued to do so eg. most recently a year ago https://cassandravoices.com/science-environment/does-dublin-require-3-railway-systems/ FYI, I was among a group of residents' associations which proposed and actively campaigned for the Dublin Port Tunnel, even though it went under some of our members' homes. We supported it as one of a set of mutually reinforcing measures that would improve traffic management and enhance our areas.
Don't forget that in the late 1970s, the entire Temple Bar area belonged to the State (via CIE, the national train and bus company). The idea was supposedly to create a bus station (and potentially, a subway hub). Ultimately, the whole thing was scotched under Haughey and Temple Bar was "developed".
I had to stop reading this. I was getting more and more angry and depressed.
Outstanding contribution from a unique mind but unhappily the problem is deeper and bigger. It depths go into culture, media and the political system to which it connects, and bigger because the Dail is merely the summer help, power has been exported upwards to the EU and beyond to the apex predator class. We no longer have a parliament just an intermediary processing someone else’s strategy. You don’t have to look too far, there’s 17 of them.
Sinead nails it by standing her ground on diagnosis and delivering an essay worthy of Economics in One Lesson or The Road to Serfdom. But economics on its own won’t solve the deeper and bigger problems.
Eddie Hobbs
Dead right on those “solution” mongers. Don’t let them deflect you from the problem analysis, Sinéad. Keep going. Staying with the problem is absolutely key. As per Socrates to Meno, “..To search for the solution of a problem is an absurdity. For either you know what you are looking for, and then there is no problem, or you do not know what you are looking for, and then you are not looking for anything and cannot expect to find anything..”. - Keep talking about the problems, describing them, and the proper solutions become unavoidable.
"Dans la vie, il n'y a pas de solutions. Il y a des forces en marche. Il faut les creer et les solutions suivent" Saint-Exupery. Vol de Nuit
Indeed that brings to mind the matter of institutional reform that Sinéad has as her object (I infer). The institutions of this country are roughly a hundred years old. These institutions are not supposed to represent the arbitrary will of the present. Rather they are the outward manifestation of the country’s character, of the collective character of all of our people living here since independence. For better or worse they are an expression of the country’s needs, the will of our nation, as has made itself felt in our democracy over these hundred or so years. Point being that radical measures, great reforms, and far reaching transformations of our institutions may be putting the cart before the horse. In my opinion we might need to start with the horse.
Agree with you in so far as I believe that institutions are a set of values with an organisation to serve those values. Thus values precede the organisation and organisations can last far longer that the values that gave rise to them. One example is the Catholic Church in RofIreland. For decades, it provided, inter alia, primary and much secondary education in the form of a privately owned, very heavily state subsidised (teachers’ pay/conditions) and state regulated (eg. curricula, exams). Even with that, a 1972 referendum removed the Constitutional recognition of the special place of the Catholic Church, along with specific mention of other religious groups (including Jewish Congregations) from our 1937 constitution. IMO, the institutions to which we delegate our power (in elections) need to be radically re-organised. Our values now are basically a high material standard of living based on trading goods and services. At one stage, we emigrated to get that ie. 1950s, 1980s and before. As Sinéad has pointed out, we have not given ourselves the kinds of organisations that can enhance life here for all those who want to live and work here. Now, we are a country where the population has increased by two-thirds in 60 years, the workforce has doubled in 40 years and immigration exceeds emigration. Some of our institutions have changed, but have enough? And if these are to change, what is the set of values on which new/changed institutions are to be based? At one level, we seem to recognise this, as only one outgoing government has been re-elected since 1969 ie. the Bertie Ahern led FF-PD governments elected in 1997 and 2002. There has been some churn in political parties during that time. But is that a good enough way to reset ourselves in a very different world from that in which our way of governing ourselves was institutionalised in our 1937 constitution? A Swiss politician once told me that because the Swiss have 4 referendum days every year, they have plenty of opportunities to discuss/decide what it means to be Swiss without waiting for general elections every four years. They can develop, explore and decide on options about everything in society. Many of these options do not come from those elected to local/cantonal/federal assemblies and the wider public service. That calls for different type of statecraft, IMO.
Great article. My own theory is that all of the problems Ireland are seeing are all across Europe. Rents have soared in Spain for example, with regular talk of gerontocracy. Further, it seems that infrastructure could be built across Europe until 2008, when capitalism - built on the ludicrous idea of exponential growth on a finite planet, forever - reached its breaking point. The difference is, the rest of Europe had already built its infrastructure and institutions by then. After 2008, the finance system disconnected from physical reality and money was printed and printed, but the stuff infrastructure is made from - steel from coal, copper, concrete from coal - couldn't be. And so every project looks fine on paper but in reality, with resource limitations in every direction (including water, sand and soon the master-resource oil), it couldn't be built at anything close to budget. One thing someone can try is Google any city in Europe and "housing crisis" and see what turns up. And this when birth rates are at an all time low. There's something a lot more sinister than ineptitude going on.
the same problems are at play in every Western country but for mismanagement, the Irish Governments of the last half century (in several periods of economic booms) are in a class of their own, and deliver outcomes unacceptable outside of third world nations
The question then is, are we actually a First World nation?
I only just found you last night on a podcast Sinead and I'm so happy! I was listening to the Irish Times podcast with Hugh Linehan. I have to admit I listened and felt both incredibly disturbed and incredibly excited. Finally someone who is actually being allowed to speak and who actually knows what she is talking about. Honestly, this is such a breath of fresh air.
Very insightful Sinead, I agree with most of what is said , however, we do have a successful export agency and some very successful food brands etc. However these are the exception for sure, the lack of capability at public level to deliver out services other than redistribute and collect money from the citizens of the country is a real issue for sure, we need a much more capable civil service who can deliver out infrastructure and planning at speed .
We suffer the same mediocrity as the rest of the world when it comes to politicians . Who would want to be a politician ?
As you have said this goes back to the foundations of the state and our party politics has perhaps stopped the civil service from moving forward and organising itself to be more aligned to the needs of the citizens it serves. It needs to be modernised and reshaped to the world we live in today , there are glimpses of ability in certain areas but very few and far between. I haven't heard one politician in government talk about the modernisation of the Civil Service and its service delivery.
There are very few senior civil servants household names ( Robert Watt maybe an exception) why is this so? I agree with you that we need to up our game at this level and encourage a culture of "Cathedral Thinking" rather than what can we get away with until the next Minister is appointed. How should we go about this?
Thanks you for articulating so succinctly what I have been feeling in my gut over the 25 years since I have left Ireland. I love the country, but feel so frustrated at the gap between where Ireland is and where it could be given our wealth and our amazing people. Don't stop now Sinéad, you are speaking for so many of us, and your voice is a ringing bell that needs to be heard by Irish across the world.
Your article really struck me because I can recognise parts of what you are describing in ordinary life: people working, paying taxes, trying to contribute, and still feeling trapped by housing costs, public-service gaps, and constant financial pressure.
I also noticed your line about “pissing off the right people” being a sign that you are getting close to something important. I understand the need to provoke debate, but I’m wondering who you believe the “right people” are. Shouldn’t the pressure be directed mainly upwards, towards government, departments, policy-makers, and the systems that allow public money to flow outward without building lasting public capacity?
For people living inside this system now, what is the practical solution? What can ordinary working people actually do, individually or collectively, when the diagnosis is clear, but the pressures are immediate?
I may be wrong on the details, but my understanding is that Finland did not simply rely on market solutions. It used stronger public policy, including Housing First and citizen-led democratic mechanisms, to treat housing as a social necessity rather than just a private commodity.
So my question is: why can’t Ireland have the same level of public ambition? Why are ordinary workers left paying the price for a housing system that does not allow people to live affordably, move for work, or build a stable life?
Your writing is very sharp, and I can see that you have thought deeply about housing, public spending, and how ordinary people are being “super squeezed” with such realities!
At various stages, people in Ireland had levels of public ambition. Where else did Aer Lingus come from? Later, Tony Ryan emerged from Aer Lingus to set up
first GPA, which "failed" but it did lead to Ireland becoming a world-wide centre for aircraft leasing and then, Ryanair. Later An Bord Báinne (now Ornua) gave rise to Kerrygold. Earlier, the Irish Free State set up the first national electricity system in the world, when it decided to build the Shannon Scheme in 1925 and set up the ESB two years later. I found some evidence that the approach then adopted to electrification inspired FDRoosevelt to set up TVA and later BPA. see my short article on this development https://www.academia.edu/128581192/Power_to_the_People_Arthur_Griffith_and_the_Shannon_Scheme For the sake of completeness, the hydro station at Ardnacrusha was overbuilt. Only four of the 6 turbines provided for were ever installed, as those involved overestimated the water flow.
Why not visit Galway during June you might find something interesting there hence to the green light “Ring Road”
Incredible reading. Such a good way of explaining the current landscape.
Housing in Ireland is not in a crisis.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a crisis as “a time of great danger, difficulty, or uncertainty when problems must be solved or important decisions must be made” - a crucial turning point in a sequence of events. By that definition, what Ireland is experiencing fails the test entirely.
A crisis implies a break from normality. A threshold crossed. A moment demanding action before it’s too late. What Ireland has instead is something far more damning: a permanent condition masquerading as an emergency.
I moved to Ireland in 1993. Housing was a problem then. It was a problem in the years that followed. Three decades of unbroken, consistent, structural failure. That is not a crisis. That is policy.
Calling it a crisis does something insidious - it implies the situation is exceptional, temporary, and ultimately resolvable once the emergency passes. It lets decision-makers off the hook by framing chronic neglect as bad luck. It gives political cover to those who have repeatedly chosen not to act.
Ireland doesn’t have a housing crisis. It’s worse than that. It has a chronic housing condition — one that has been tolerated and accepted by successive governments for at least thirty years. Sinead’s excellent piece illustrates how this came to be. Let’s see if something comes of it. 🤞🏻
You don’t really seem offer many actual solutions here, just more state intervention and spending? You seem to be in fact contradicting this idea for most of your article, instead blaming most failures on government intervention in the market such as HAP no? State intervention being ineffective does not mean the state is ‘absent’, it means the state is, as is widely known, is generally ineffective at providing good outcomes when intervening in markets. The failure of intervention is not in fact evidence of the need for more intervention
You also state that a model of over intervention necessitating deregulation applies perhaps to the US, but not to Ireland. I again, don’t understand what you mean. Texas for example has a rapidly growing housing stock and falling rental prices due to the fact they are incredibly lacking in state intervention, significantly more so than Ireland. Is your claim really that the state in Texas is bigger and more far reaching in the market than in Ireland and that this justified deregulation? That just seems absurd, I’d really like if you could clarify why deregulation as a solution applies to the US, but not Ireland specifically.
You take issue with the concept of modular housing for reasons I quite frankly don’t understand. Lowering the ‘baseline’??? Pricing it into the ‘market’ ??? Again could you clarify what exactly you mean here. Can you actually explain the mechanisms and why the alternative world where there is a ban on renters choosing to live in modular housing is better for the welfare of renters than the alternative. Modular housing does offer a legitimate partial solution to a housing shortage, opposing it because it’s beneath your standards only harms renters.
Maybe read it again...
I can't see how all you've taken from the article is that the author is proposing more intervention and more spending. Even if you want to give the author no credit at all, you could at least recognise that she's proposing better usage of the vast amounts of public money being spent and more sensible interventions grounded in long-term policies to address challenges at source.
You might not think this a novel take, but given that we haven't had anything close to that in 20+ plus years, it should be said again and again in as many forums as can be.
What you have missed entirely, willfully or not I don't know, is the framing of the problem and an articulation of how the various mechanisms and bandages that have been rolled out ad hoc have failed and will continue to fail.
And lastly, she does propose a solution, in so much as one can in an article. That the state builds more. That the state owns what it currently rents and borrows. So that we, the taxpayers, get value for the money we contribute. Again, not novel, but practicially revolutionary in the context of what we currently get.
TribeMan is a “because markets” ideologue. Don’t waste your time and energy on yesterday’s men …
Who cares if "deregulate, enable market supply, build modular units in gardens" would result in more housing supply, benefitting renters / first time home buyers? They're private sector, and that gives Sinead the ick!
Seriously though, there's no distinction between government as (an over) regulator (bad) and a builder of social housing (good)
Or between the private sector as renter landlords (bad) or developers (good)
Public vs private is a terrible way to gauge whether policies are good or not
It's not about MORE government intervention, it's about long term EFFECTIVE government for all members of our society. The current govt has little interest in Irish society, makes me think we desperately need to replace Me Fein with Sinn Fein
I don't believe Sinead was arguing that modular housing wasn't a convenient solution to Ireland's housing crisis. She was arguing that convenient solutions like these are symptomatic of a broader malaise and lowering of standards in public life. I suppose a similar stereotype in the U.S. is that of Millennials and Zoomers living in "their parent's basement". Sure, the phenomenon is an effective solution to the housing crisis - freely utilising excess capacity in the housing market to increase personal savings, rather than renting or paying off an expensive mortgage thereby increasing demand-side pressure on the housing market. But as the stereotype indicates, the social and societal dimensions are also important - it indicates a generation that is not thriving, and a solution that offers less than what has been offered to previous generations. Socially, a larger share of these generations grow up with less esteem and status; societally, the implicit social contract that each generation will have better opportunities available than the previous is forgotten. Thus economically rational solutions to societal problems can gradually cause greater problems in the long-term.
Oh so that's why my private health care premium.went up 40% in three years. The state is driving private hospital cost inflation through outsourcing to private hospitals. Tier 3 cascade it seems. .great so they are going to collapse the private health system also with unaffordable premiums
How about we offer solutions. All heads of the civil service. Many serviing since the 80's and 90's need to be put in front of committees and held to account. Then we can start to build a new fairer society.
re. Heads of Civil Service. Secretaries-General are now the civil service heads of government departments. They are also Accounting Officers for moneys voted on. Among their statutory duties are giving evidence to the Dáil Public Accounts Committee (PAC). By convention, this Committee is normally chaired by an Opposition TD. Note that since the mid 1980s, the normal term of office for a Secretary General of a Government Department is 7 years. This may be extended. I gather that such extensions are normally for not more than three years and for one term only. After this term, Governments may decide to appoint an outgoing Secretary General to another Department eg. Robert Watt went to the Dept.of Health, after 10 years (as far as I recall) in the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform.
Fantastic stuff, Sinéad. Is the concept of the failure premiums an original thought / lens - if not are there other examples/writers. Brilliant throughout.
This could be our TJ Whitaker moment of the 21st Century, curious that it has come from outside the Public Service. Ground breaking. Keep up the great work.
Rentierism writ large.